Between 1860 and 1868, Lewis Carroll wrote a number of poems about falling in love with a nameless woman. Some of them describe allegories of sleeping with her and suffering agonies of guilt and pain as a consequence. At around the same time he was also confiding a sense of deep guilt and mental agony to his private diary, though he never admitted the cause of this pain. This is also close to the period of his life that has been most heavily censored by his family. Two of the four missing volumes of his diary cover the years 1858-62. His nephew and first biographer Stuart Collingwood hinted the love poems were based on some personal 'disappointment' Carroll had experienced, but did not add any more detail. Despite this the potential meanings of this episode have for a long time been overlooked, due to the belief Carroll was a virginal pedophile. Karoline Leach was the first to draw attention to it when she posited Dodgson was engaged in an affair with 'the real Alice's mother, Lorina Liddell. Jenny Woolf, whose book follows Leach's closely, rejects this idea, but concurs he may have been involved in some form of adulterous relationship at the time with an unidentifed woman.

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